Gardenia
by fenxian
Summary: He couldn't smile, so he laughed. He laughed loudly and sharply and there was always the unbearable feeling of salt on his lips. He was laughing on the night when it first made its presence known. The demon.  Preslash. AU.


**A/N:** This is post-season 2, because I had a wicked idea one night and I don't think it fits with the manga's plot (I haven't read that much of the manga yet, tbh, because I don't have the time).  
It's AU, obviously, and inspired by **Gardenia**, from the OST. The italicised parts are either the translated lyrics or my edits to the lyrics. Sorry for centering them, I'm aware this makes this look like a douchey songfic.

The fic is called '_sadness in parts_' because there may be more, but it works well enough as a standalone thing. I might write something about how the characters got into this situation to begin with, eh? I was also hesitant to call it pre-slash since nothing much happens, but thinking of what I have planned for the next parts.. yeah.

(And I still hate ffnet formatting so damned much. FYI.)

* * *

**Gardenia ~a sadness in parts~ (1)**

_The scent of this flower has even enchanted the stars. I want to forget_

_everything and become one with the Moon. _

_This perfume is my soul._

While his beloved had been alive, he had smiled often. She sometimes said that she'd fallen in love with his smile and she could love him into eternity for it.

While his beloved had been alive, he had found himself to be irreversibly in love with the garden. Many an afternoon had been spent there, fingers digging weeds out and mending those precious Sterling roses.

While his beloved had been alive, he had developed an affinity to fine teas. That was probably under her direct influence and it was no surprise that a day's hard work in the garden was rewarded by an evening among the grasses and roses, tea-scented and laughter-filled.

While his beloved had been alive, he had traded his usual long nights in favour of the daylight she belonged to more than his darkness. They both lived peacefully in the sunshine and fresh air.

While his beloved had been alive, he had lived his life as well: it was all one lazy, beautiful day after another. One foot after the other, one step at a time. Happily.

Now he lived his life in the shadow of an ever-broken clock, and he doubted it could still be called 'living'. The clock rewound itself every now and then, and his ears would ring with the sound of her voice and his own, _together_. It sometimes slowed to a torturing crawl and it felt like his broken heart only beat once a day. Nowadays however, that clock was mostly entirely still.

His days, once warm, were now cold nights. He mourned the distance between his beloved's time and his own, and measured it as best as he could with only stars and silence as his tools.

Now, he lived and breathed in the shadows. She had never really liked the night, so he lived with the illusion that he wouldn't remember her without the bright daylight she was so fond of.

Now, the pleasant heat of a fine berry tea in his mouth was replaced by the useless stinging of alcohol down his throat. Weakness burned where there had once been strength and he daren't look in the mirror.

Now, the garden was overrun with tall weeds and thorns. Nothing bloomed and that was alright. He sat in the space that was once brilliantly illuminated and his lonely midnight shadow was cast over her seat.

Now, he couldn't smile anymore. His lips couldn't achieve that perfect arc she'd loved to see.

He couldn't smile, so he laughed. He laughed loudly and sharply and there was always the unbearable feeling of salt on his lips.

He was laughing on the night when it first made its presence known.

_The demon.

* * *

_

_You are a sad flower. _

_Flourish on this uninhabited island;_

_and become my dream._

**night, The First.**

Once-loved roses rotted away, still spreading the tendrils of a sickly sweet smell.

He held a glass to his lips with one hand, throat working as he drank deeply. The other hand firmly held on to the neck of a bottle, as if it was the axis upon which his world spun. He bruised crawling gardenias under the heel of his boot.

His eyes stung and as soon as he was aware of tears that might threaten to spill over, he twisted his heel into crushing the pale flowers at his feet. He had the feeling that he wasn't the type to cry, and he refused to let the person he thought he was down.

He laughed the pain out instead, as loudly as he could. Then he smiled bitterly at the hollowness he'd heard. The shrill sound of a child's laughter came from inside the house, mocking him for his weakness.

There was the sound of something shattering and the glass in his hand cracked.

Dizzy and half-afraid, he chalked the sounds up to one overactive imagination and one tired self. He shared his life with no-one; there was no-one else there.

Later, he went inside to resume his dreamless sleep. The small glass window from the entrance door was broken, along with the mirror in the hallway. He stared at his fragmented reflection in the shards that still remained inside the mirror's frame, seeing nothing but shadows.

_What a familiar feeling._

_

* * *

_

**night, The second.**

The night seemed alive and breathing. He breathed along with it, wondering if tonight would be the night his heart would give up entirely. Was there any point in even trying to go on, as aimless as he was? He breathed and the night breathed along with him.

When something crashed inside the house, he went still and the darkness also ceased its slow exhales.

His hand twitched against the tabletop, fingertips lightly tapping against rust. Maybe someone had broken into the house. _Was the same bastard who had killed Lia back to kill him too?_, he idly wondered.

The house creaked under steps in abandoned places – he could hear the floorboards sing loudly from the lounge, where he never went anymore (he refused to remain among the memories that lingered there).

Things turned quiet a short while later and he went in. There was a brief question of whether he could catch the culprit taking a nap and breathing shallowly, he unlocked the lounge door for the first time in days and pushed it open.

In the moonlight, he could clearly see footprints in the dust, delicate and small. They led to the doorway he was standing in and he stepped back to follow their trail, but they ended neatly at the door.

He wasn't even sure whether to laugh or not. There was half a footprint right over the threshold and thinking about _where_ the other half of that footprint might be made him laugh out loud.

_It really was a good trick, he'd always thought so.

* * *

_

**night, The fifth.**

It finally occurred to him that something was severely out of order. He had never lived in, or even _seen_ a house with windows that shook so badly they almost broke. He was sure an earthquake was not the cause – the ground beneath his feet remained firm despite his best attempts to make it sway under the influence of alcohol.

He lifted the bottle to his lips, pausing when the racket ceased. When it resumed a moment later, he drank until he was out of breath.

The windows in the entire house seemed possessed, shaking in their frames.

At some point during the ever-lengthening night, it became clear to him that the noise was caused by hundreds of tiny fists pounding against the glass. Something wanted to be let outside, and it wanted to be let outside _now_.

Knowing he was being mocked once more, he stood up and walked towards the house, knees weak. Shadows shifted both inside the house and inside him.

He saw his own reflection against the darkness and upon noticing how rather dashing the scene was, – _dark hair, dark clothes, rotten garden_ – he promptly smashed through the veranda door with a tightly-clenched fist.

* * *

**night, The sixth.**

Things had been moved during the day, while he slept in his old study. A fine porcelain tea set was now laid out on the kitchen table. A teacup seemed accidentally, tragically overturned as though someone had left in a hurry.

Eyes half-lidded in the late evening, he took one of the tiny cups in his hand and set it down on its similarly delicate saucer. He pretended to pour tea into the cup, empty hands tilting in mid-air as though holding a teapot.

_New Moon Drop, is it?_ he thought to himself, using an imaginary name for a tea that didn't exist. _What a good scent,_ he smiled over the empty cup.

_What a farce_, he sneered.

Then remembering himself, he set the teacup down and with a last look around the kitchen, left for the garden.

* * *

**night, The ninth.**

It was quiet until a quarter past midnight and there was no warning before _it_ started playing the violin. _It_ played loudly, and obnoxiously. It felt as though _it _was trying to be grating on purpose, much like a petulant child trying to prove a point or outsmart the teacher.

He leaned over the table, head on his folded arms, his chest heaving with dry sobs.

He hated everything. He hated life, and death, and Lia (even though it wasn't her fault she'd rescued him, then fallen for him and him for her), and himself, and the house she'd picked and the tea set he'd gotten immediately attached to, and above all: that violin both their hearts had been set on. He hated that violin honestly, extensively, passionately, and he wanted everything to stop, the end, to disappear entirely. He would've liked to return to how things had been _before everything_ but recalled nothing of what '_before_' had been; nothing except annoyance and brief flickers of belonging.

The song turned melancholic towards dawn, and he fell into tired sleep, draped over the rusty iron table while the violin carried on with its sorrowful tune. In his dream, it occurred to him that only the Devil could weave such an intricate, beautiful spell and disguise it as music so well.

Upon waking, he recalled feeling strangely flattered.

* * *

_Beautiful and honest; You give me splendour and sweetness._

_Your magic makes my blood darken _

_and I wait for the moon tonight._

**night, The twelfth.**

Bodiless footsteps sounded harshly against the wooden floors, then against the shattered glass he hadn't cleaned up, and finally, against the pavement in the overgrown garden. They stopped on the other side of the table he sat at. He tried to remain calm when he heard a sound that might have been an exasperated sigh. He showed no sign of caring when the chair opposite him slowly moved. The moon appeared from above the cover of clouds and suddenly he could _see it_ there, glittering a semi-transparent silver.

At midnight, the demon made its appearance.

**night, The twelfth; Continued.**

As soon as he could see the demon clearly enough, he pushed the table towards it, _into it_, wincing at the sound the table made when its legs ground against the brick pavement.

The demon's immaterial form dissolved and the table only got as far as the second chair, managing to knock it down. A moment later, the demon reappeared and gracefully bent to set the fallen chair upright once more.

It sat down quietly, with an expression of forced patience on its face. When it looked at him, he could tell it had lost its half-there quality. The demon was no longer an intangible thing that played annoying violin and upset the order of his kitchen.

"Now, is that how you think you should treat old friends, _Sebastian_?" the demon said as though that was supposed to mean something to him. It looked down at its own gleaming black nails and sighed. "I recall being taught better than that."

At once, Sebastian Michaelis did and didn't recognise the boy sitting across from him. There was a name he could attach to that form (a boy who seemed no older than thirteen; one bright red eye and one eye patch; dark clothes that rustled like silk and smelled of death) and there were a great deal of things he knew about the demon, but there was no way he could say that name or think of those things.

The demon seemed to understand his trouble.

"I don't think I should waste any time with explanations right now."

He frowned. He would've liked explanations.

"Your beloved Lia has been murdered," the demon began, his visible eye narrowing. "You're alone, bereft, empty. The people who have done this to you are still out there and they would do worse if you let them. Would you like revenge before that happens?" he asked with a quirk of the lips.

Sebastian found himself unable to deny it. Of course he wanted revenge. Before he could answer the demon's question with more than the beginning of a nod, it went on.

"You're also in another predicament: you know your name and recent past, but nothing beyond it. There are many things you don't know about yourself, and there are things about you that aren't the same as every other man's," it said, with a tone unfit for a young boy.

"There are things you see differently, and there are things only you see. Would you also like to find your own past again?"

That question directly addressed the vast empty space inside him where his memories should have been. The feeling of familiarity towards the demon came from the very same space, unexplained and half-unwanted.

_Yes_, he wanted revenge. _Yes,_ he wanted his past back.

_Yes, he wanted, he wanted, he wanted…_

"Yes." He paused to look for words. "What do I need to do?"

The boy smiled again, much like the proverbial cat who had gotten the canary, and that sweet smile never left his lips as he spoke.

"I'll help you. Normally, I would take your soul after I've fulfilled my duties, but for certain reasons out of my control, I can't do that. However, if you agree to grant _me_ one wish after I've finished granting _yours_…"

"That's fine. One wish isn't much."

"Perfect," the boy said. "In that case, all you need to do is…" he started, and leaned against the table to whisper the rest of that sentence while he removed the eye patch.

The uncovered eye glowed strangely with the demon's own mark.

_Your white flower is false, gardenia. I've followed you through the gate_

_and into the labyrinth_

_and embraced you._

"Kiss me."

The moon above their heads was obscenely bright.

**night, The twelfth; The end.**

"Do you have a name?"

"Ciel Phantomhive, at your service."


End file.
